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For the opening of the exhibition "The Margins of the Factory" at ADN Platform, Nathaniel Mann performed his rendition of the famous traditional Basque song "Oi Pello Pello". Nathan sings it to raw footage from "Work in Progress", showing men and women at work in the Lea Artibai region in Basque Country, where they trim rubber parts destined for the global automobile industry. While singing, he manually assembles a device which broadcasts his prerecorded voice to a transistor radio, with which he then performs a breathtaking duet.

Jaime Cuenca wrote about "Work in progress" and "Producing time in between other things" for the catalog, published by Sala Rekalde, that came out on occasion of our solo exhibition curated by Alex Baurés at FRAC Aquitaine.

A veiled reference to the language of the ready-made shines through here, which is subverted at the same time that it is being cited. The ultimate goal is not the artistic appropriation of objects by removing them from their context of production, but precisely the exhibition of such a context, of the processes that bring it to life, and of the contradictions that traverse it. Extracting the diverse forms of production from the fabric of life in which they are practiced and displaying them side by side, in the most dispassionate way, they themselves reveal the relations that link and oppose them. Artistic activity operates here at the margins of the amateur work of Jos van Gorkum and the piecework carried out by the women of Markina – both, in turn, at the margin of the factory – and in doing so questions its own form of production.

Frac Aquitaine presents a solo exhibition of Iratxe Jaio & Klaas van Gorkum. The artists have been invited by curator Alexandra Baurès to pursue their reflection on notions of work and the production of art within conditions marked by globalisation

Iratxe Jaio and Klaas van Gorkum have been selected to take part in the Mondriaan Foundation residency at Lipac, Laboratory of Investigation into Contemporary Art Practice, in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

On Saturday the 18th of May, they will introduce their research project "Draw some lines in the sand and call it an institution" at Centro Cultural Rojas. The artists will talk about the challenges of organising oneself collectively at different stages of institutionalisation, and the theatrical aspects of staging justice. They will be evaluating their own experiences in Occupy Amsterdam, where they initiated "The Beursplein Hearings", a formal structure within the camp that collected testimonies from its members on the ethical dilemmas they encountered while dealing with social problems and keeping order on the public square.

On the 8th of December, Iratxe Jaio and Klaas van Gorkum will talk in L’occasione about their experiences in Occupy Amsterdam, where they initiated a kind of "Truth Commission" in the camp. Through a series of hearings, fellow Occupiers were questioned one by one about the ethical dilemmas they encountered while maintaining order on the square, in relation to the shared ideal of a radical, participatory democracy. Their experiences in the camp will serve, on the one hand, as a starting point for a critical reflection on the group dynamics that lead a community towards and astray from consensus and principles of equality. On the other, as a case study for the role that artists may play in these processes, using the methodology of the cross-examination and the trial as artistic instruments.

Through the scenes in four films, Miren Jaio reflects on the family and the space it adopts as its own, the home and the role of the family institution in shaping the ever fragile and unstable boundaries between private space and public space. The text was written as an accompaniment to the drawings of "Of Mortgages and Marriages" by Iratxe Jaio and Klaas van Gorkum, and published in "Meanwhile, in the Living Room...".

This seminar, organised by eremuak, will focus on the legitimisation discourses that inform public policies, to explore questions such as: new institutional frameworks, self-instituting processes, collective practices, definitions of participation in art and society, financing methods and the laws of patronage and heritage policies.

The seminar will take place over two days and is structured around two committees in which a number of different professionals will take part: artists, curators, and art historians. In each session, the debates will be preceded by a talk on the proposed subject.